Within Reason - #93 The Etymology Nerd - How Social Media is Transforming Our Language

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Adam Aleksic is a linguist known online as "The Etymology Nerd". His educational videos are watched regularly by millions. His forthcoming book "Algospeak" is currently available for preorder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Alexic, welcome to the show. Hi, Alex. I'm super excited to be here. The etymology nerd. Perhaps the world's first, maybe only linguistics, social media influencer. What's going on with that? Why are people interested in linguistics so much? I think they're interested in linguistics for the same reason and not interested in linguistics.

It speaks to something broader about society, right? It's not just words. It's never just been words. Like, you can't talk about anything, obviously, without using words. So it doesn't matter whether you're a mathematician or a biologist or a philosopher, you're using words to express your reality. And that means linguistics reaches into each one of those kind of spheres. And kind of what I like doing about my videos is that I've been able to use linguistics as a lens to go deeper into all kinds of things to explore, like our sociological background to explore different academic fields. And I think people see that there's something inherent in our language that speaks to the human existence.

distance. Yeah, I mean, your videos are all, I think, if not then definitely primarily YouTube shorts and reels. I know, make infographics as well, but it's the kind of stuff that is trivia a lot of the time. It's like an interesting fact about this word or this turn of phrase or something. So it's actually quite difficult to know exactly how to to dive into a long form interview about etymology. But the good news is that there is a book on the way that you've just announced, which has a sort of more general theme, which is specifically about the way that social media is affecting our language and that social media is the is the, is the frontier of linguistic development. So perhaps in getting into this, you can give us a brief overview of the

thesis that you're talking about. Yeah. I mean, I think we're now in an era where all language change is happening on social media. You can't get around it as a linguist and as a content creator. And as someone who just consume social media, like, I can't stop thinking about this, right? Like, I go on Instagram and TikTok and I can't turn off linguist brain and I can't turn off content creator brain. And I keep thinking, like, what's going on with how these people are using language and the virality and how things spread? And we have new slang terms emerging at a faster pace than ever before. It's not a coincidence. It's my book, which is called AlgoSpeak, kind of is this theory that algorithms broadly are shaping how we speak.

And the prototypical example is like on alive. There's a lot of kids saying on alive now in middle schools instead of kill and commit suicide because we're saying it online on TikTok because you can't say kill or commit suicide. But I think it goes a lot further than that. I think the internet is shaping every corner of how we speak in very subtle ways. So this is interesting. I saw a story that the museum of pop culture in Seattle, which is the hometown of a certain Kirk Cobain of Nirvana. had a Kirk Cobain exhibit for the 30th anniversary of his death, and they put up a placard, not saying that Kirkobane killed himself or committed suicide, they put up a placard saying

that Kirkobane unaligned himself at 27. And obviously, there was a lot of, like, very shocked kind of responses to this. There were some people who thought this is like paternalistic, like, why can't we talk about suicide, like, as it is. There's other people saying, like, this is like this childish phrase, which minimizes that. In another way, I think it's the future of laying. I think I've talked to a lot of middle school teachers and parents, and their kids are sometimes learning the word unalive for suicide.

I talked to one teacher where the kid submitted an essay on Hamlet onaliving himself. This is just normal. And it might sound weird to us, but these kids are going to grow up. Their kids are going to grow up. And onalive is where language is setting. Yeah. I mean, my favorite genre of complaint about the world is complaints about younger generations, being particularly bad at using language or lazy or anything like this.

I've got an interesting quote here. Here's the quote. Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased. The ordinary spoken language has also steadily cautioned. People used to say, raise the carriage shafts or trim the lamp wick. But people today say, raise it or trim it. When they should say, let the men of the palace staff stand forth. they say, torches, let's have some light. Now, the examples there kind of give it away,

but you would think you're listening to somebody complaining about people on TikTok, but that actually comes from the 14th century by somebody called Yoshida Kenko, I think is how you pronounce the name. And there is a common thread. I think I've seen Twitter threads about this from every single century of people complaining that younger people are using silly words, using ridiculous slang. TikTok seems to be no different from that. And yet there is this idea in the air that because of the fast pace of technological development, there is a sort of in-principle shift that's happening because of social media. So do you think there is something unique about the kind of TikTok development of slang, words like unaliving oneself,

that kind of thing? A bit of a non-answer, but it's the same, but it's different, right? We're going through the same etymological processes that we've always been going through. There's no new like thing happening really. We're creating words as we always have been using the same exact linguistic techniques that we have been and people are reacting to it the same way that people have reacted to language change throughout

all history. I do think if anything, it's happening a little faster now because of how algorithms, creative pressures like create communities and create viral trends that push words to the public faster than they've been the past. It's just the same process

accelerated. Um, I think the specific medium affects how we talk about things, right? Right now I'm talking in a different medium than I do in my short videos because I'm, like, I have this longer form platform. In my book, I talk in a different medium. Like the medium in which we communicate fundamentally is going to shape the way we express ourselves a little bit. But again, it's humans adapting to the medium.

Human language adapts to that, and that's not new. We've always spent, that language has always been this adaptive kind of thing that we harness no matter what to communicate. And so I keep looking through and finding examples of like historical analogies for each of the words we're looking at, right? Unalive is not the first time we've created a euphemism for death.

That's like the kids are genuinely using it that way. When a kid says, Hamlet on Alive himself, that's not, that's a euphemism. They're not talking in social media anymore. They just feel like it's a less, it's a more palatable word to talk about death. And we've been euphemizing her death words forever. That's why we say, like, passed away. That's why we say, kick the bucket.

The word decease itself comes from Latin de Kessus, which was the euphemism of the previous Latin word for death, Morse. And probably the word for death was an old English euphemism for the old Norse word, Sveltime, which was a euphemism for the even older English word, Duyan. So, like, we've been doing this. And the modern day middle schoolers aren't doing anything different from the Romans and the Vikings. So in that sense, I'm not concerned that the kids are saying on a vibe, right? It's happening. But that's a very normal human thing. But I think the main differences are the medium and the speed in which it's happening.

And maybe the perception. Like people have always not liked what younger kids are saying, but there's a reason like brain rot was the 2024 Oxford University Press word of the year. There's this overwhelming attitude that our new language is tied to our kind of internet dependencies. I think there's a lot of concern about that. and I'm hoping to somewhat distill that conception. Yeah, people don't like talking about death.

We know that much. I don't know if you've ever come across this thing called terror management theory. It might be of interest to you. It's a little bit sort of dubious the psychology behind it, but the idea is that so much of our human activities and behaviors are essentially attempts to distract ourselves from our fear of inevitable death. And so there have been these studies which are difficult to replicate, where people are reminded of death just by mentioning it.

The most famous of these was some, I think in Arizona, some judges were studied, and they were asked to recommend a set amount for bail, for someone who'd like solicited a prostitute. And simply being reminded of the word death or being asked what happens after death or something, made those judges on average set the bail hundreds of dollars more expensive, which seem to suggest that there's something about just thinking about death, which changes our very approach to the world. And so these guys think that so much of what we do is an attempt to manage our terror of death.

And that would perhaps go away to explaining why we take such efforts to come up with euphemisms. The problem with euphemisms, as with slang itself, is that there comes a time when they stop being euphemisms. it's like it's not it's not even a euphemism anymore i mean there are so many uh like you said the word deceased sort of starts as a latin euphemism at some point in its history just becomes the word itself i can imagine all kinds of terms around sex are probably the same i imagine that the so stephen pinker calls this the the euphemism treadmill uh like inevitably like once a euphemism is used enough it just becomes the original word and then we like what i was saying about the old English word replacing the other old Norse word replacing the other old English word, we just cycle

through things that seem more comfortable to us and we keep doing that. And then because there is no part of a word that sounds better or worse than another word, it's purely semantic associations that's always been. So like kind of side example, but the word moist, the reason people don't like it isn't because of the sound of word moist. Like there's nothing wrong with like hoist or whatever or moose. But it's our association in our head. And once we, use a word in a certain context enough, the association in our heads changes to make that word serious. And there's a future in which on alive is this very serious word. And it's like we have to come up with another word to stop saying unalive. And it's very common with like terms for sex.

It's very common with like slurs, different ways to describe minority groups. We've cycled through a lot of different ways to like talk about the disabled community, for example. Like moron, imbecile idiot It used to be genuine classifications, then those became insults. Then we had the R word, which also became an insult. And then, so, like, we've cycled through a lot of different stuff. And even now, there's more people advocating for new language to describe. Until you get to the root of the problem, the cycle is going to keep on going. And for death, especially, we're not getting into the root of that problem.

So we're going to keep on cycling. We'll get back to Adam in just a moment. But first, do you trust the news? I don't. And a lot of that has got to do with the media bias that inevitably seeps. into all kinds of news reporting. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way for us as consumers of this media to navigate this space, objectively comparing different headlines and seeing how different sources are

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like blown up from niche communities into mainstream memes. They're spread by the algorithm to move more virally than they could in the old days. Think about the 1950s, like a slang word like cool, started in the African-American community and slowly, slowly filtered out, right? It was the jazz communities, Miles Davis, birthed the cool, and then like the beatniks start using cool, like a tangential social group.

And then like the bikers and whoever start using cool and then eventually cool gets adopted into like mainstream consumerist culture. But this happens over the course of like the entire 20th century. Like cool was a thing in African American communities in like the 1880s and like the rest of America only started finding out about that in like the 1950s right and you look at a lot of like modern ticot slang all coming from african-american communities and it's happening so quickly so rapidly that we don't realize where these words come

from at all like a lot of like yacht you know ate cooked busing like all slang words i have a whole list of like 30 i think there's a wikipedia page on it too but like Like, they, you don't think about that. And a lot of people using these words, middle schoolers, no idea, they heard the word online. They're perpetuating, you know, not only that, but like a lot of other niche communities. I have a chapter in my book about all the words coming from in-cell communities online. Yes. And it's crazy how much influence the Manistphere has on our language.

So maxing, sin, pilled, beta, cuck, sigma, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it does, it does sort of spread out. think it's because it usually starts in a kind of humor, right? I don't know if the slang itself necessarily starts as humor. You can imagine, you know, African American communities using the word cool or whatever, totally not supposed to be humorous, but somebody taking the concept of looks maxing or whatever it is, but applying it to something else. I'm, you know, algorithm maxing on my YouTube channel or something. It's kind of funny. Think about what goes viral online.

things that are funny go viral online and that means a lot of our slang words that we're getting there's something inherently funny to it a lot of the like African American slang words come from like hood irony memes right like unk and huzz and like there's some new ones emerging now come from kind of like memes making fun of hood culture

but it's like fundamentally a joke and then the other ones like like Giat sounds funny because it's like an exaggeration of an African-American accent, which is like now that's like getting into a very historical like trope of like making fun of these accents. You have a short about how certain English phrases unknowingly for most people come from making fun of foreigners. Fraises like long time no see, phrases like no can do. No can do. Can you tell us about those? Again, like, this is the same process, really, if you think about it.

It's like Americans in the past using some kind of language that to them is funny. And it spreads because it sounds funny. The phrase no can do, even if you don't know where it comes from, by the way, it comes from a mimicry of like Chinese pigeon English. But if you don't know where it comes from, it sounds a little funny. It's like a fun turn of phrase that's not, that breaks your. expectation, right? Expectations subverted, comedy achieved. No can do sounds funny, so it spreads even beyond people who didn't realize they were making fun of how Chinese Americans talk. And that's the way

memes diffuse. It's always the way memes have been around before the internet. That was an early meme. And now we're just having the same process reenacted on this faster scale, on this larger scale. Hmm. We just talked about euphemisms. Everybody knows what a euphemism is. Can you tell us what a disphemism is? Sure. So a disphemism is the opposite of confusion. Euphemism is good from Greek, EO, meaning good, and dis means bad, right? So a disfism is when we replace a word with another word that sounds worse. Thinking back to terms for death, there's like sewer slide. Kermit, like, those sound like funnier and like less serious than death, but not in a euphemistic way. Or like, it's like when we use something that's funny. So like saying raw dog instead of just like doing something unassisted. So I had a video on like how people are saying raw dog in everyday life.

And I think that's a great example of a dissonism. It's like instead of using a serious word, making it less serious. Yeah. So instead of taking like a super sexual word and replacing it with something nice, you take something nice, like the concept of sitting medicatively on a plane for eight hours without watching television, and you say that you're raw-dogging the flight as the trend would have it. But then I think a lot of people forget that some common slang words essentially originated in this way. Words like suck, for example. Oh, man, that sucks. That's a sexual, like, dysphemism,

essentially, right? And a lot of people kind of don't realize this, because like we say, after enough time, they just stop, they sort of cease to be metaphors or jokes and they just become the words themselves. I was looking at this quote from, I forgot the 19th, 19th century poet

but the quote is language is fossil poetry. And I really like that because it's this idea of like it's built up jokes and memes on top of each other and whatever was most compelling to a particular generation. That's the poetry that they kept. And then the next generation comes,

and they keep the words that they like the most. And look at us now. English has been around since the year 800, and it's layers upon layers of things that were most compelling to people in the past. Yeah, I had a question which was about the phrase, body count, which sort of cropped up online. And I wanted to ask you, do you think body count is a euphemism or a disphemism?

Because in one way, it's a euphemism. you're talking about sex, but you're using a non-sexual term. But in another sense, you're taking something relatively sort of fine and nice to think about, which is, you know, having sex with somebody. And you're using a term for, like, killing people, the kind of thing that a soldier might say, how many people has he killed in the battlefield? So do you think that body count is a euphemism or a disphemism?

There's no reason it can't be both. I mean, categories, I've always, I might say this again later in the interview, but I think categories are the silliest. thing because it's us trying to make sense of what's really an incredibly chaotic reality. And there's times when you can use body count as eugenism and times when you can as a as a deism as you described. I also think it plays into this like longstanding trope of like love is war. And this is a classic conceptual metaphor, like talking about your your latest conquest

or trying to win someone over. This is like just in conceptual metaphor theory, just like a very basic concept of we describe our bodies as being counted, right? That's like just a historical pattern. So we've been using this kind of disphemism slash euphemism since we've had a way to talk about love. Yeah. There's an interesting discussion in George Orwell's politics in the English language about this concept of metaphors, which are either dying or dead. So he's giving advice on how to be an effective writer. And he says that if you want to write, interestingly, there it is. You've got it on hand. He says that, you know, you should avoid using dying metaphors. And what a dying

metaphor is, is something which is so overused that it's boring, but not quite so overused that it's just, you know, become the word itself. So a dead metaphor might be something like the phrase brand new, right? This was originally supposed to evoke imagery of, you know, a fire brand, something being forged in a fire. So you'd say brand new. And when people, were saying that that sounded really compelling but then you got to like spice it up by saying like this is brand spanking new this is letting fresh off the you know like exactly because brand new is now an actually dead metaphor that is it's not even a metaphor anymore it's just an actual phrase with a with a with a definition and there's the dying metaphor which is somewhere halfway in between that

so one of the examples all well gives is something like stand shoulder to shoulder with that's still evocative of imagery that's still very much a metaphor an image but it's the kind of image that when you hear a politician say, we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies. It doesn't really move you in the same way. So a lot of these slang terms, I think, are in that category of dying metaphors. They're still slang, but they're kind of getting a bit boring and they're moving slowly into the realm of just becoming words again. Yeah, I think a huge driver of slang in general is wanting to differentiate ourselves from the past. It's not cool to talk like your parents. It's never been cool to talk like you're it's cool to talk like the the new thing because you're

it's called contrast of identification like you're creating this identity this linguistic identity and our language always shapes our identity separate from how we know the english language to be in the past it's cool because it's new so when you change like when brand new came out that was that was brand new right um but after while you need a you need to you need to add an infix you got to say this is brand spanking you like it's um and i think um with our slang words there's a few paths they can go. They can become overused to the point where the metaphor becomes dead, right? So we've had a lot of like slang words die out.

I don't hear anybody say on fleak anymore, even though that was super trending in 2014. You can have something that seems less obtrusive and just like naturally, like maybe it's applied to a concept which makes sense. So the word selfie was new to like 2013. Like the word cancel came around right around the time of on full. leak and like as in you cancel someone um and those terms are completely new as well and yet they stuck around because they had a purpose they sounded less weird to us and they became ingrained

in our language but they still sound kind of new and fun to say like it's it's kind of fun to say like you're cancelled right like um so i do think it comes a lot out of that yeah it's it's interesting how we often forget the origin of words well and i think one of the indicators that a metaphor has become dead, or rather, I don't know if this would be a metaphor, so that there are words that start as meaning the thing that they literally mean and sort of unintentionally become metaphors. In the film industry, for example, we still say cut when we stop recording. And why do we say cut? Actually cutting tape. Exactly. And so in a way, when I say cut, it's kind of a metaphor because we're not really cutting. But it's not like that was

done intentionally. I'm not trying to evoke an image. Right. It's like an unintentional metaphor. Same thing with even the word film. We don't use film anymore. Even the word footage. You know, I've got so much footage on my hard drive. What is footage? It's measured in feet. It's the amount of film that you have. Yeah, absolutely.

But in linguistics, this is called semantic drift. So it doesn't like, again, categories are a little stupid. As, like, the more you study linguistics, the more you realize that every way we have describing words and language, we just don't know.

There was a Wikipedia page of, like, list of problems in linguistics we haven't solved. And it's like, what is a word, what is a language, what is a sentence, how does grammar work? Like, we don't know any of this, right? So, but we create these conceptual categories to help us describe it.

The, what you're describing it here is frequently termed semantic drift. Like, there is a meaning, and the meaning changes over time. And sometimes the meaning changes because there is a technological innovation, that causes the meaning to shift. I was just looking at the,

I did a video on dashboard the other day, and like the car dashboard comes from this literal board put in front of like a carriage to stop horse from kicking up mud into the carriage, to dashing up mud, as it were. And, but as dashboards got applied from carriages to cars, the meaning like drifted to

like people who drove the first cars did think about dashboards in that way. And maybe in that sense, it is a metaphor. Maybe not because all these words are just arbitrary ways of gesturing at what reality really is. But there are many forces that can cause semantic drift is where I'm getting at. Yeah, you talk about in that video, in cars, particularly, things like roll down the window. You don't roll windows down anymore. You press a button. And with electric cars, you might still press the ignition, even though you're not igniting an engine.

anymore. You might hit the gas, even though there's no gas. There are miscellaneous examples from across all areas of our life, things like you hang up the phone. Why do you hang up the phone? Because you used to literally hang it, but not anymore, but we still have that language. I actually think, like the reason those etymologies in particular are compelling to my audience is because it's like a physical example of a word changing. Like you can physically explain this one from this invention to bad invention, right? But what we talked about with euphemisms, the euphemism treadmill is also semantic drift, right? When a word like deceased goes from a euphemism to now it's like people don't want to say that anymore, death.

Death was a euphemism. And now people don't want to say death because the meaning in our heads drifted. And it's constantly happening every time you evaluate your new information, which is to say all the time. So I start to think, will this happen with words that right now are. say, internet-specific or computer-specific, so that they're so sort of new in the history of our language that it's difficult to imagine how the semantic drift will happen to them. But I think of things like, you know, on Twitter you might ratio someone, which literally means that your post gets like more likes than the original person. I can so see that in a world where everybody

gets rid of like counters. You know, YouTube got rid of the dislike counter. Imagine this recharge. But people still talk about this concept of ratioing, just being a response that's more successful. So then maybe I make a response video to somebody that people prefer and it goes down in history or maybe somebody will say that, you know, Ice Cube totally like ratioed NWA with this disc track or whatever, you know, I can see that happening with a lot of these internet specific terms too. And that'd be funny because it's applying conceptual domain to something that you don't expect. And I think I've seen a lot of copy pastas of like L plus ratio. And it's not necessarily referring to the Twitter thing anymore, but like L plus ratio and this,

this context is just saying, um, you're a loser ratio, you know, like that's, that's all it's saying. Um, but like another thing with like raw dog, for example, um, is doing the same thing as like if we were to say like this person ratio, that person in real life. It's applying this, we have this conceptual domain of raw dog and being associated with sex. And now we're applying it to another conceptual domain of going on planes. And to draw one thing from another thing is how we make words sound funny. I'm, I'm, I'm, Might be over explaining it, but this is kind of fascinating to me. But it is also, in a way, like, a kind of a clever metaphor, like when a, when a comedian says, you know, this is like the, the this area or focus, you know, this is like, oh, this is like the rap battle of politics or whatever.

When they do that in a clever way, it's funny, but it's also clever because the way that a metaphor works is by taking, like, one quality of one thing and associating. with another and using it to evoke an image. So, like, to raw dog a flight is funny, but it's also kind of clever because you're isolating this very specific thing, which is like doing something without any artificial aid, let's say, and you're applying it to flying a plane, which is so unexpected, which is clever as well as funny, I think. We adopt words when they sound clever, when they sound funny, when they sound compelling to us in some way that previous language has not.

And in that, like, we add another layer of poetry to the fossilized remains of language. It is something funny. Do you know what the etymology of the word slang is? No, actually, I don't. Because apparently, nor does anybody. Apparently, we just kind of have no idea where it came from, which I found quite ironic. Like, I thought that was... It's all right that I couldn't conjure that one.

I probably did look it up. Like, usually if it's like something satisfying, I'll remember. it. I've seen like some fake etymologies for it. Like people say this is related to the word language. It's pretty sure that it's not related to the word language. They say it's shortened language. Slang is shortened language. Definitely not. Don't

trust any like kind of etymology where they combine words in that way. Like acronym acronym is almost always fake. So I've seen like a lot of when a new word comes up and you don't know where it comes from and there's like an acronym like I've seen people say that

Giot stands for Girl Your Ass Thick or Girl You that or like what it's just an exaggerated pronunciation of God um and oftentimes when we encounter this new word it sounds really satisfying to us to say oh yeah slang is just short in language but then we forget the actual etymology which means we forget the social patterns behind what's going on that's right don't get your etymological facts from anywhere else folks just from the etymology nerd it's uh it's quite interesting how i think that's true with with slang but i always give as my favorite example of of etymology, the word atonement, because I was stunned when I learned this. I don't, do you know the, the etymology of the word atonement? I come from a sort of theological

background, right? And so we're reading about how Jesus is supposed to make you at one with the father or sort of at one with truth or goodness or whatever. And so the word atonement is completely English. It sounds like it could be sort of Latin or something, but it literally means at one month. The state of being at one month. Yeah. Yeah. So it's literally just the sort of shoving together. So that is an example where that kind of thing has actually happened where they've really just taken at one month. And you've got this word atonement. I think that's one of my favorite examples because

it's so you expect etymologies to be these incredible. It's right there. But it's like it is incredible because I've seen the word atonement for 23 years and I've never thought to break it down into its constituent parts and never thought like what's actually happening under the hood here. Yeah. But it's kind of, it's because it's kind of rare that that happens. And in fact, if you saw, for example, a Christian on YouTube saying that the word atonement, it guys, like it just means at one month because you're like at one with the father. You've probably listen to that and think that's a bit conspiracy theory. I think he's, you know, he's sort of

making that up. But it's actually true. It's verging on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I wonder if there are any instances of slang being essentially like brute forced into existence. Because the thing about slang is that it's cool. It's funny. It's interesting. It's very hard to brute force it, right? That's why if you've ever seen Mean Girls, there's this famous scene where the character Gretchen is trying to make the word fetch happen. And nobody wants to adopt the word fetch because Gretchen keeps saying like the word in like the most awkward circumstances. and a key factor to what makes word spread is called obtrusivity. Specifically, you don't want it to be obtrusive. So, like, if a word sticks out too much, like Fetch is sticking out too much, then you don't want to use it.

Alternatively, if we tie it to a meme, like with brain rot words, then it can be funny in an obtrusive sense, but those will usually die out, like, on-fleak was obtrusive, but cancel and selfie were unobtrusive. So they were able to slip neatly into our vernacular about we didn't even question it. We just, like, adopted it without a second thought. So what's the word supposed to mean in Mean Girls? What's the usage of it supposed to be? Like, that's so cool. That's so fetched.

Fetched. No, I haven't come across that one. No, yeah. It's a great movie. You can see the perfect example of when linguistic innovation doesn't work out. Yeah, but there's something, nobody wants to use slang words which aren't cool. And if they are obtrusive or it seems like they're too convoluted or contrived, then they're not cool, right? But there are attempts to do this, especially in, like, the political arena.

And there are sort of two ways in which this crops up. One of them will be, but I think this often happens with, like, sensitivity. It's not exactly slang. It's not supposed to be cool. But people try to popularize new terms for the sake of sensitivity. I remember when the word weird was, like, trending to, like, class five Republicans as weird and, like, Democrats. Like, honestly, to me, that seemed a little bit, I think Democrats were trying a little bit too hard with that. And it worked a little bit from the people who were like very pro-liberal.

But actually, there's a lot of research that showed that weird ended up alienating a lot of like the centrist class. Like they were like making it stick out too much, this concept. What were you thinking? I was thinking about I remember, I don't know if this is still the case, but there are these movements to stop calling people blind people and instead call them people with blindness. It's like put the people first. People first language, yeah. And so, and I get the impression that a lot of people who are in fact blind look at this and feel like it's kind of patronizing and say, this isn't what we're used to. And probably because it's sort of an attempt at brute forcing it into existence, it kind of hasn't worked. I mean, another, another example

that comes to mind is the Latin X thing. It's not so, it's almost all Latinos hate that unless like you're at a super elite higher like but it language depends on the in group in which you're speaking and if you are at this like ultra liberal echo chamber like a lot of times like that is the word to use because it's it's signaling to the other people in your group that that's you are woke right you're in the politically correct group um i used to work in an organization teaching people with disabilities how to ski and they asked us to use person first language and I talked to a lot of those people and they prefer the term disabled people

because they felt like that was a very important part of their identity why are we sugar-coding it? Like it seems like it's like treating them less seriously. And it's the same kind of thing with, like let's look at On Alive right now. Both like the disability thing and Onalive are going through the euphemism treadmill, right? We're finding like a more palatable way to talk about disability

and we're finding a more palatable way to talk about death. And there's reactions to it on both sides. So with On Alive, some educators actually think it's great because it's giving kids a way to express their feelings, a way to talk about death when they're not comfortable using the word death. And other people are like, this is bad. They're not, they're like, they're not treating it with the seriousness that it should be treated. And again, the same thing is happening with disabled person versus person with disability. It depends on like your mental headspace and how you approach that word. And of course, this is different because this isn't people trying to be cool.

This is people trying to be inclusive and sensitive. In their own way, it is what they think is like, it's cool to be inclusive, right? Yeah, it's like, it's morally cool to be inclusive in this way. It would decidely pick up if it fits with a broader societal idea of cool. Do you remember Emmanuel Cleaver, who is a former mayor of Kansas, he's a congressman, And he finished a prayer in Congress by saying, our men and our woman. Which is a great example of this. I didn't see that, but sure.

Of course, like, you know, I get what you're doing there. But not even if, even if our men was like a male gender term. I think people would still find a little bit cringy that you're sort of trying to, trying to brute force this. But it's the fact that that's not even what it means, you know? It was just sort of a, I think the best example of, where this goes history and her story is another example like um not not etymologically have to do anything with his and a lot of people like will treat the man the word man that way like

mankind um historically in old english man just meant um all of man and then it semantically drifted to specifically apply to just male men uh but we still have some remnants of the old definition um but i i get that it is interesting yeah i understand that because in that case there too, yeah. In that case, like, mankind, man used to just mean human, but it used to mean that. It doesn't mean that anymore. Now man means male, right? The reason that I drifted to men is probably because of sexism. So there is some validity there. Yeah. And so, but I think that the effective tactic here is like, if I was writing an essay and I was trying to think like, well, I don't really like the word mankind, because it doesn't really include women. I wouldn't say, I wouldn't write out like man and woman kind or something like that. I would say people. I would. I would. like choose a different word. And words do just sort of fall out of popularity and they sound a little bit antiquated. And mankind is already a slightly antiquated term

and there will come a time when people probably don't really use it anymore. I think that if you try to brute force it by saying anytime someone says mankind, you just say, oh, can you say people kind or woman kind as well? It's never going to work. It will work in specific in groups.

Language is never like, there's no English language. I remember saying that there is no accepted definition of what a language is, right? every person speaks differently from every other person. And there are groups of people that speak differently from other groups of people. And the group of people in elite liberal academia will probably say like men and womankind or they'll say, you know, but like maybe the broader American people are frustrated with that and use different language, which also points at some general political trends we've been seeing recently. Okay, so this is kind of interesting.

We've talked so far about people coming up with euphemisms and people coming up with slang terms, essentially for reasons of sensitivity or being cool or because, you know, if you try to say the F word on television, you're not going to, you're not going to get a show, so you've got to come up with a euphemism. But a lot of the slang words we see online today, particularly the sort of TikTok slang stuff, is not just about being sensitive. It seems to be about essentially algorithm hacking. That is like people are almost superstitious about the way the algorithm works, such that It seems like people will come up with terms specifically just to get around being banned. It's not about sensitivity because when you hear the slang word, you know what it means and it still just sort of has the same effect.

But it's just being invented for purposes of like I say, algorithmic avoidance. And so historically this has been what's called the outgo speak. So people say on a lie because you can't say killer suicide. People say segs. I've seen doctors. I've seen sex educators and porn stars alike all use the word segs on. social media instead of sex because sex with like g's and really yeah sex with two gs and really everybody knows what that means like everybody knows it on a live means um there's no or like even if

you censor like sometimes in captions i would censor words like i'd do s like uh asterisk x right everybody knows exactly what that means there's no you know but something in our heads tells us that's a less offensive word and also apparently the ticot algorithm agrees they have actually started censoring the word on alive. Of course. But people still use it because it's in the the social media socielect, this group of people who are online, they associated with that domain of use. Like this is a phrase that you associate with a certain context, so you use it in that context. I think it's different between like when somebody on social media wants to say that somebody died, one person might say, this person passed away. And they're saying that

because when you hear that, it's sort of, it hits you less. It's a bit sort of nice to hear. When someone say, when someone says he was unalived, that's still like a jarring term. It does the same thing. It definitely has a different connotation. Yeah. But it doesn't, it doesn't seem to be about sort of sensitivity about the word so much as it's just about sort of trying to, trying to avoid the algorithm. I think it's a big line. I think the offline usage has developed a life of its own. So when I'm talking to these middle school teachers and parents, like the middle school kids genuinely are just using it as a synonym of death. Now online, we use it like as a way of talking about suicide, um we use it in a joking way but we'll also use other phrases like kermit sewer slide or something um but

we we associate words with certain domains certain and certain groups of people use it the group of people who was online talking like the mental health community uses on a live a lot on TikTok but the community of like middle school kids use it because it just sounds you know like a good way to talk about death um kind of interesting also um I mentioned that's called algospeak historically, like this term for describing how algorithms are shaping the way you speak. But really, I think the same is true, like writ large. The words are metadata.

So, like, when you say Algo hacking, I've made videos on, like, the etymology of Skibody, that got two or three million views, etymology of Riz. And the reason those videos did so well is because the algorithm knows that certain keywords are trending and pushes videos with those keywords more. And creators are aware of that. And so creators make more videos with those keywords for the algorithm to push. I made my Skibbitty video because I knew Skibbity was trending and that it would do well.

And then it did well. And then more people probably made Skibbitty videos. And a lot of like, this is how like in general, words are inextricable for metadata. Even the word on a live, if you use that in a video, the algorithm will know to push that to people in the mental health community probably. So we use certain words with an intent for the algorithm to push it to an audience, oftentimes just to go as viral as possible because slang words are more compelling to people. They count as word. The algorithm picks up on that word, classifies that as part of the video and sends it to people who like that word. And it kind of turns into a positive feedback

loop where we're getting all these slang phrases from. Yeah, same thing. I've seen slang for white, as in like a white person, just the letters YT, which you've also seen people holding up their their hand like this to the, to the camera. There's like layers of abstraction to how much the Algo speak is. Holding up their hands? Yeah, like holding up your palm like is another way to signal like white if you don't want to use YT. So TikTok has a policy against using like overly racialized language. One common problem that you're running into with Algo speak is, is that it's often used to, like, protect from controversial issues. But a lot of minority groups, identities, are the controversial issues, right?

So talking about race relations in the United States, like, for example, the N-word is censored. You might use the ninja emoji or something. But I don't know. I feel like it should be the right of African-Americans to use the N-word if they want to. But it's censored for all people, right? So it takes that word. there's a lot of like smaller examples but um like in the mental health community um and in like the eating disorder community or something or like there's there's a lot of examples of

words that are meant to stop political discussion right but the political discussion is that group's existence yeah some of these i mean in particular the the communities like eating disorder communities, anorexia communities, and these exist online and there are people who sort of encourage each other and sort of celebrate this kind of stuff. And certain hashtags, like if you try sort of hashtag ED, I'm sure that if you type that into TikTok, it will just say something like, you know, here's a, here's a helpline and it won't show you any results, right? And so for that reason, people come up with new hashtags, which, you know, I don't know what they are. I've sort of seen this kind of thing crop up before you stumble upon them and you

realize what it is because it will be like a bit like how the word um n b like e n b i e became a word for non-binary people because of course it sounds like n b but it's spelled well a lot of terms for queer communities were created online because they felt like actually it's been proven that in the past the ticot algorithm has suppressed videos not not like removed but suppress videos from queer creators using queer keywords so they they create words like um back in 2019 there was like La Dollar Bean. It was like instead of spelling lesbian and the TikTok's voice to speech would like pronounce it as La Dollar Bean and now now they'll just use like WLW for women loving women in the lesbian community. And we've had other words like like zesty or like those all emerged recently

because like they're trying to find new ways that sound maybe a little bit funnier, sure. So they'll also go viral in that capacity. But in another way, they are speaking to the algorithm as much as they're speaking to you. Now, is this unique to social media, that essentially the creation of slang not to be cool or not to just be sensitive, but out of like necessity, essentially. I guess the only analog I can think is historically where people would sort of speak in code because they didn't want people to know what they were talking about, like little like kind of dog whistles to each other. Like that's, I can think of that happening in the post. Or cockney rhyming slang were historical examples of like underground communities using slang. No.

I would not say this is new. I would say the medium is new. But like I said earlier, okay, so an example I use a lot is like, you know, how the word segs is replacing the X with a G. In 1948, the author Norman Mailer tried to publish his book The Naked and the Dead. And his publisher told him, Norman, you can't publish just to use the word fuck way too many times. And Norman went back and replaced the word, every single instance of the word fuck with the word fug with a G, F-U-G. And what he's doing there is replacing a k-s sound with a g-s sound, which is exactly what people are doing when they're replacing sex with segs.

This is not a new thing. And newspaper comic strips since the year 1899 have been using so-called grollicses, like symbols inserted into the comic to replace curse words because you can't use, you can't curse in newspapers.

So again, the medium has, like, I would say actually, like newspapers are still more restrictive than like algorithms. And we have always been finding ways to adapt. Humans are resilient in our use of language. And if you try to stop us from using a certain word, we'll find a workaround because we will get to that underlying topic that we want to talk about.

That's quite right. It's fascinating as well, though, how, like, if you do it on a newspaper or a, like, a widely syndicated article or something, and you try to introduce a new slang term, you might kind of have to indicate what it is. you put it in scare quotes, or you say, if you know what I mean. Whereas like on TikTok, people just sort of say it and people catch on. So I've been saying, I do think the medium is new and the speed of which things are happening is new. And one reason for that is the changing nature of mass communication.

So historically, the major like sources of public information have passed through groups of elite gaykeepers, right? If you wanted to publish a book, if you want to publish an article, if you want to go on the radio, If you want to go on the TV, you have to pass through these filters of being, like, elite, educated, oftentimes, like, white, rich, you know, no longer. And I think that's kind of the beauty of social media. I think it's less alarm. I think that's actually, frankly, pretty empowering that anybody can upload a video, go viral, and showcase their situation. Anybody can have a platform. That is a completely new change to language.

We've never had this, like, extremely public soapbox for the entire populace before. And I'm actually really excited about that. And that also has trickle-down effects into language. So because, like, if you want to publish a newspaper or a book and you have slang words, you're not going to be treated professionally, respectfully. But now that it's not an upper-class thing to communicate anymore, slang, which has traditionally been associated with the lower class, is now able to proliferate more than it has in the past.

Now, when it comes to all this algorithmic, curation and slang and stuff. We're kind of talking about this objectively as if we're both not beholden to algorithms, that we're not both content creators of different kinds. I mean, the very video that people are watching right now will have been finally tuned in its title and thumbnail to try to attract people to come and watch it to so-called, you know, to make a video which, as they say, the algorithm likes. I'm suspicious of this. I don't think the algorithm exists. what the algorithm likes is just what people like. But I wondered if this knowledge that you have about the way that algorithms and languages interact has informed your content creation.

I don't think it's what the algorithm like. I don't think it's what the people like. I think it's the algorithm and people working together. Algorithms amplify human behavior. If humans want to click on something, the algorithm is going to push that to more people because humans want to push it, but more people see it and more people click on it because the algorithm pushed it. In system and like this is called a complex system and um it's like an emergent effect of the algorithm combining with human behavior um language is emerging because the algorithm censors words so humans create new words so the algorithm censors those words and it's only because of the algorithm and human nature working together that we're we're getting as many slang terms as we are um new slang words

are being spread faster on the algorithm because um it picks up on trending phrases And those phrases trend because they do compel humans to some extent. I do think the slang words that are spreading on platforms, the grammatical structures that are spreading are somehow underlingly more compelling to us. But the algorithm picks up on that and spreads that. And then creators make more videos with those things. So they spreads even more and it snowballs. And I think it's too simplistic to say it's human nature that we're doing this or it's the algorithm doing this.

It is absolutely both. And I can't stop thinking about it either, also as a country. creator. So do you use this, I mean, in non-obvious ways, you said you made a video about, you know, I don't even know what Skibbidi is. I mean, maybe you can explain that for, for me and the other listeners who probably don't even want to know outside of the necessity for this conversation. But you say that you sort of do that directly, but there must be sort of indirect ways that you're doing this too. I mean, it's quite obvious when you literally make a video about a slang term that that's what you're doing. But are you thinking about this more subtly when

you make your content. So for any viewers who might have heard my content, I speak a lot faster. I chop up my videos more because I know that'll perform well on shorts platforms. And even the voice I'm using now is assuming there is another audience, right? When I'm speaking with my friend, I'm going to speak differently. And that's also just a normal thing that we change how we speak depending on the environment and how we want to be heard. I do think, again, that's working in tandem with the algorithm, right? So I'm changing how I speak because I think the algorithm wants to push a certain kind of speech. I'm changing my word choice for sure. For this book, I interviewed a lot of creators and asked them about their word choice and uniformly, like some of the most viral

creators say that they are carefully considering their use of word choice to make like phrases that sound a little interesting so people will comment on it. So, then that generates more engagement so the algorithm pushes it again the algorithm will push things with more comments that is that is an algorithmic thing but the people commenting is still a human thing so like what it is a emergent force of both those happening in ones and creators are aware of this and creators will use words and they'll use phrases that you might want to comment on um which is really interesting so what do you think of the defining characteristics of like uh social media video influencer lexicon or ways of speaking you said you said you

you speak faster? Like, is there a reason why you speak faster? The name of the game is retention. And I'm sure as a YouTuber, you're also very familiar, that you want to keep your audience as long as possible, because that's another thing that makes the algorithm push your video more. And if I speak faster, that might make someone rewind and watch more of the video, which is good. It might make someone less bored. If I speak too slowly, you might just want to scroll away because there's another more entertaining video below mine, right? If I speak faster, you might even comment.

I've gotten a lot of comments on, wow, you speak so quickly. Could you speak a little slower? Some people are like, I love the way he speaks. I think the speed of which he speaks tickles my brain. I've gotten comments across the spectrum. But the point is, I've gotten comments. And that means the algorithm registers that I'm getting comments and post my video even more. So there's multiple reasons why it's good for me to speak faster.

And I do speak quickly in real life. I'm an energetic, excited person. but the specific intonations I use are also different. There's a technique called macroprosity where you stress certain words to make sure they grab your attention. And that's like something I'll employ a little bit more on short form video because that also continuously hooks you back in.

If your attention starts to drift, then I'll summon your attention again by saying something really interesting by stressing my word, regardless of the content and the nature of what I'm actually saying, the linguistic technique I'm using, also uptalk at the end of my sentence can make it sound like it's unfinished, so you want to hear what's coming next. And so you'll hear a lot of like the traditional influencer accent, like the beauty influencers use uptalk a lot. And they will actually

use macroposity more than the valley girl accent, which that accent derived from. But there's many different varieties of influencer accent. I think if you look at a Mr. Beast video, he makes all his words pop for maximum excitement. I'm on this island right now and I just bought this island and the winner gets $1,000 right? But he says this in like the most excited possible way and if you look at an actual like

interview with Jimmy Donaldson, he's not talking like that. He's modifying his voice to go maximally viral and you know that's not a coincidence. There was this leaked Mr. Beast memo in September from one of his employees where he described exactly

the strategies he uses and he keeps talking about retention. The entire 37-page memo, he's talking about retention, retention, retention. This is what we're going to do to retain the audience. This is how, like, we, like, he says, like, in the memo, 99% of movies would not succeed on YouTube. That doesn't mean the movie isn't good. It means that it's not harnessing its medium correctly to go maximally viral. And he does talk about, like, certain linguistic patterns that he uses for attention. It's not a coincidence. Like, everybody is modifying their speech. And if you're not doing it consciously, you're doing it subconsciously by mimicking other creators that you've seen before.

So I did like an interview, like a survey, 30% of creators do it subconsciously and about 60% do it consciously. But the subconscious people are just picking up on this as like the correct way to speak online and then unintentionally perpetuates itself as the online accent. That was going to be my next question was how much of this is conscious. I imagine when people like Mr. Beast is very well thought out. But like I think that when I do a video. I can't not do it consciously because I'm a linguist. Yeah, of course, of course. You have a much more kind of collected tone than a lot of YouTubers out there,

which I think is really interesting. Perhaps people are drawn to that. Well, I hope so. I mean, I do think that people might notice in my podcast. I think I talk slightly differently to even anything that's scripted, like any kind of video essay or anything that I can do multiple takes of, because I'm incredibly picky about making sure every word is articulated properly, and it kind of becomes a bit of a performance.

I don't think I like put on of, I'm not like intentionally going like, okay, I'm going to be more excitable and whatnot. It's just because I'll say a word and then I'll go, I'll say a word. I want to make sure that was clearer. And it ends up coming out a little bit differently.

But that to me is like entirely subconscious. There is no thought process in my head of like, man, if I speak in this way, it's going to increase retention or people, aren't going to get its board or whatever. It just sort of comes out that way. It's too reductive to say that there is one pattern that is successful all the time, right? Different people find different things for you. You mentioned to me before this interview that you used to have a cabinet

like the one behind you. It was the same cabinet, right? It's this very cabinet right here. Comments, right? And the trippy drawers generates comments because people are like, that's a fun cabinet. And then like your video gets pushed a little bit more. And like the same thing happens with linguistic choices. Yeah, well, if anybody else can think of any instances of things that we've done, which seem like we might have been doing them intentionally in order to increase engagement, then leave a comment down below and let us know what you think those things are. I wanted to ask whether anything you said about language has ever unexpectedly like annoyed people

or upset people. Have you ever sort of puts out some kind of etymological quirk that surprisingly has been more controversial than you thought um absolutely i mean at times i've been a little careless one time i off the cuff like sort of as a joke said irish spelling was weird and i got i got a lot of flack from from irish people about that um or so like i i i kind of maybe shouldn't have said that but in other times i think um it's just very easy to upset people through the content of what you're talking like If I say, like, if I do a video on Skippy Toilet, I got a lot of comments of people saying, like, this is disgusting, this is brain raw, this is the language devolving, we're also cooked. So we get a lot of negative comments like that.

And in general, like, there's just flack for certain videos that is pretty normal. Yeah, I get a lot of flack, but I must say most of the time that that happens, I kind of expected it. It's rare that something is unintentionally provocative, but I think that when you're doing short-form content, you're putting out so much. And it's so specific. Especially because I try to turn out a video a day,

and I try to make them as well research as possible, but I don't have somebody looking over my script. I might make a pronunciation mistake or something that people are, like, out of my 400 videos, like, this one's shit, you know? This, like, how could you possibly mispronounce this word? How can you possibly say Irish spelling is weird when you're like, why don't you consider every single word? I, it was, yeah, you know, so it's a little difficult on shorts.

You did an interview with the Harvard Crimson, your alma mater Harvard University at student newspaper, in which you said, you can't really separate language and politics, I think. What did you mean by that? So what I studied at Harvard was actually, I wasn't on onto social media linguistics yet. I was studying linguistic identity in Serbian Croatian. And I might upset some Serbian or Croatians in the comments, but what really separates the Serbian and Croatian language? Like, they're not that much, like, Google Translate shows them as different languages. Nationally, both countries recognize them as different languages.

any Serbian or Croatian speaker will tell you that it's not any more different really than like British and American English and yet we call them different languages and there's a famous quote out there that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy and what that means is that like fundamentally the way we approach talking about language is through a political lens I told you that we can't define a language

I stand by that like if you look at Mandarin and Cantonese China will tell you that those are both dialects of the Chinese language. They can be very difficult to tell apart. To like, if you're what the speaker of want to tell what the other one is, they're almost unintelligible. Now, let's consider Spanish and Portuguese. It would be ridiculous to call those the same language, right?

But they have 90% lexical similarity. 90% of the words in Spanish and Portuguese are the exact same word, more than in Cantonese and Mandarin. And yet we call those languages because they're separated by a border. They each have their own army and a navy. Meanwhile, the Chinese language of Mandarin and Cantonese are under one border, so we think of them as one language. And so before Yugoslavia split up, we thought of the Serbo-Croatian language as one language. And then the country split up and language is a way to build nationalism.

You can say, we are different than them. It's us versus them. And you create an in-group of people who think they speak a certain way and a group of other people, the situation gets much messier. I don't want to go way too in depth because I could. I mean, that's fascinating. That's the idea that it's impossible if we are to even like try to define language to separate politics from this. Yeah, it's a bit like how people might want to think about nations themselves. I mean, it's a little bit weird how there are a lot of parallels between the way the United States and like the European Union works.

Why is it that the European Union is a union with countries, the United States, is a country with states, like what's really the difference, it's kind of just how you think about it. It's kind of just, you know, how people identify and what labels they put on things. And language is the same. Like, borders don't exist. And so acceptance of five. I don't think language really exists. I think everybody speaks completely uniquely. And sometimes we understand each other and that's pretty great. And sometimes you understand each other a little bit less. And then we got to like, I don't know, but like, it's called it. Even if you go to go to the, yeah, it's called a, what, an idiolact.

Ideolect is what, like, the language that you speak. Nobody else speaks what you speak, because you speak with a combination of your family background, your education, your geographic background, all of this call us, nobody, it's like a linguistic fingerprint. The way they caught the Unabomber, you know, like, yeah, yeah, like the Unabomber. Oh, tell us, yeah, tell us how they,

how did they catch the Unabomber? How did they do that? I actually, I actually met the guy, um, who caught the Unabomber, the FBI linguist, um, basically, like, okay, so when the Unabomber published his manifesto in the Washington Post, it started with his brother noticing this writing. It was like, that kind of sounds like how Ted writes. And then he sent that tip into the FBI. And the FBI, like, needs to build a case against him. So they hire this guy, James Coleman. And like, slowly they like analyze every single phrase in his

manifesto and then the writings that his brother provided to the FBI. And he has like certain linguistic quirks. Like he says, you can't have your cake and eat it to. and he says it like the wrong way. And then he has like a few other like small oddities that like really nobody else says. A lot of idyllics are just comprised of like you have misunderstandings of language. And you definitely do it. We all do. Because language is just us like trying to understand other people.

And it's never perfect. Yeah, we all do. The unabomber. The unibomer, of course, the terrorist who was, he was like sending bombs like in the post. to people and it was blowing people up and he had some kind of um yeah anti technological kind of yeah sort of like an anti modernity anti technology thing and and he sort of would and he would say things in his manifesto like you can't eat your cake and have it too instead of you can't have your cake and eat it too and it was those linguistic quirks that gave him away i mean that is that is

quite quite phenomenal i think so on that level i think everybody's speaking they're entirely own language, right? Yeah. I can't honestly understand some dialects of like, I don't know, Scottish or Appalachian English, right? I was about to say, like, that's still the English language, but it's kind of different languages. Come to England, go up to the north and, you know, ask for tea, and they'll cook you some dinner, you know, like, it's, it's, it's kind of a bit, it's fun, you know, people, um, make fun, Americans and Brits of each other for the different words that they have for toilet or

restroom or whatever, but, but like, different languages are just. just this writ large, just make those differences in dialect big enough, and soon enough you have a new language. And the only way that you can determine when it goes from being a regional dialect to a new language is probably when somebody sets up a big border and separates out the governments from each other, you know? Yeah. It's crazy to think about it.

Yeah, you're really, you're really speaking my language. You're really speaking my language. I think that there's something. It's interesting to extract that. to social media. So the algorithm creates communities fundamentally. There's like echo chambers and filter bubbles created on social media. Each of those groups speaks slightly uniquely. They use a certain, like I said again, the mental health community uses on a live way more than like other communities. And each like the K-pop stand community like gave us words like Dulul, which

started like there and then it blew up through the algorithm to other groups when it sounded compelling enough to be used outside. Lulu for delusion? Yeah. Yeah, right. But they also have a lot of other, like, very specific words and the Swifty community. We now talk about, like, being in our something era or something. But they have a lot of, like, very specific fan-elect vocabulary for, like, Gaylord,

the theory that Taylor Swift is gay or Hiddlestiff or, like, all these other, like, couple names of Taylor Swift. And, like, they have very specific vocabulary. Each of these groups speaks a completely unique language. and sometimes that language can be blown up out of the community by the algorithm when it's compelling to other groups and at that point it becomes a part of the greater social media socio-elect a sociolact here being a language spoken by a particular social group and that's really sociolics are more real than than languages in my opinion well Adam it's been fantastic to speak to you I can't remember when when you first popped up

for my, my algorithm, but you seem to have sort of been, been everywhere. People who, even if they don't know your name, I'm sure they'll know your face and your voice. It's been incredibly successful, it seems, at least over the past year or two. And I think people should be able to see why. Thanks so much for taking the time and hope to have you back on some time near the publication of your book, which is currently available for pre-order, like right now, right? You can go and I'll go speak. Yeah, go, go click that, that button. I'll leave a link in the description. And yeah, leave a, leave a comment, leave a like. Tell us what you. you like tell us what you think of my chester drawers and our haircuts and whatever else you like it's

been it's been fun thanks for coming on thanks alex alex